So Long, Long Wave

After 102 years of broadcasting on the long wave and after forty-eight years of Radio 4’s presence on long wave the service closes on 27 June 2026. This now leaves just five countries in the world still broadcasting on long wave, that’s Romania, Poland, Morocco, Algeria and Mongolia. Other major broadcasters who have recently shut down their long wave transmitters include Europe 1 (December 2019) and RTÉ Radio 1 (April 2023). 

The closure of Radio 4 long wave has been a long time coming. In 2011 the then Director-General  Mark Thompson suggested it may end as part of  yet another round of cuts citing that it was only used by about 90,000 homes. The transmitter equipment was reaching the end of its life and the stock of valves dwindling as they are no longer manufactured. There were a couple of stumbling blocks. Firstly, what to do with the programmes that went out on long wave only. These were Yesterday in Parliament, the Daily Service and some of the Shipping Forecast bulletins. The answer was to shift the first two over to Radio 4 Extra. As for the Shipping Forecast the number of readings was cut down from four to two (three on weekends) and the final long wave only forecast was read at noon on 31 March 2024.

The second issue is that of RTS, the radio teleswitching system that piggy-backs on the radio signal and controls electricity meters, switching on Economy 7 storage heating and the like. As of this time last year over 300,000 homes still had RTS meters waiting to be converted to smart meters but I’ve not seen anything more recent that suggests how this rollout programme is progressing and what happens after June if households haven’t been switched over. For the technically minded RTS, which started in 1985, uses something called Phase Shift Keying to send messages over the airwaves via a Central Teleswitching Control Unit in Edinburgh onto the BBC Message Assembler at Crystal Palace and then on to the three long wave transmitters.

There will be a knock-on impact outside the UK as well where the long wave signal reaches a large expanse of northern Europe. For anyone still relying on old tech, or like myself still able to pick up Radio 4 on their car radio here in France, albeit with some interference everytime I pass a telegraph pole or pylon, it will be a sad loss, coming as it does a year after the lockdown of BBC Sounds for international listeners. I first remember hearing the BBC on long wave on a school trip to the Brittany coast in 1973. On a rainy day at Cancale our coach driver switched on the radio and picked up Radio 2. It was the Jimmy Young show in case you’re wondering.

Let’s also hope that Britain’s nuclear submarine fleet don’t rely on long wave broadcasts. There is the oft-repeated story that one of the signs that the UK still ‘exists’ is the monitoring of the broadcast of the Today programme on Radio 4, though quite what they do on Sunday when Today is not on air remains a mystery.          

Long wave transmissions haven’t gone down without a fight. In the summer of 2023 the Campaign to Keep Longwave and a online petition was set-up, though it has only reached about 7,600 signatures. In October 2025 an Early Day Motion was tabled in Parliament stating that ‘the House notes with concern the BBC’s intentions to cease broadcasting BBC Radio 4 on long wave’ and that it ‘remains a vital part of the UK’s broadcasting infrastructure, providing reliable analogue coverage during emergencies and in remote parts’. This was all to no avail and this year that the BBC announced that it would be closing ‘later this year’ and that ‘listeners will receive at least two months notice’. On-air announcements were broadcast at intervals during the day on long wave advising of the planned switch-off but on 11 May a date was finally given, that of 27 June.

I opened this post by saying that long wave broadcasting has been in existence for 102 years, at least in the UK. The Dutch had started using it in 1919 and Radio Eiffel Tower started in 1922. This is my timeline of long wave broadcasts from the BBC. For a far more detailed history can I point you in the direction of this excellent blog post by Chris Greenway.

I've condensed the UK long wave history into just under four minutes in this video:

Some more detail: 

July 1924 - long wave broadcasts start on 187.5kHz from a transmitter at the Marconi works in Chelmsford. Using the callsign 5XX it is also known as the High-Power Station. It mainly broadcasts London’s 2LO programmes.

27 July 1925 – a new 25kW transmitter opens at Daventry in Northamptonshire also using the callsign 5XX.

9 March 1930 - station callsigns are no longer used and the BBC offers the Regional Programme or the National Programme which comes from Daventry on 193kHz. The signal is supplemented by a number of medium wave transmitters.

6 September 1934 – a new 150kW long wave transmitter opens at Droitwich in Worcestershire carrying the National Programme on 200kHz. This 1500m wavelength will become familiar to listeners for the next half century. Daventry remained is use by the BBC until it closed on 29 March 1992. The Droitwich transmitters are replaced in 1962 and again in 1987.

1 September 1939 – ahead of the declaration of World War II the National Programme closes and is replaced by the Home Service on medium wave. The Regional Programme also closes. Droitwich is converted to medium wave and the power upped to 200kW.

16 November 1941 - long wave broadcasts resume from Droitwich carrying the BBC expanding European Service.

12 February 1943 -  regular broadcast start from a new high-power station built at Ottringham (station OSE5) near Hull. It’s east coast site means its ideally placed to carry broadcasts on behalf by the exiled Dutch government as Radio Oranje. It also carries BBC foreign language services including Dutch and Danish. After the war it continues to b broadcast European Services and eventually closes in 1953. 

29 July 1945 – the BBC Light Programme launches on 200kHz (1500m)

22 April 1956 – from this date the Shipping Forecast moves from the Home Service medium wave to the Light Programme long wave.

30 September 1967 - BBC Radio 2 replaces the Light Programme

23 November 1978 - Radio 2 moves from long wave to medium wave (plus VHF/FM) with Radio 4 UK taking over on long wave. The final Radio 2 long wave shipping forecast is read at 17.55 by chief announcer Jimmy Kinsgbury. At midnight Brian Matthew, on Radio 2, hands over to Radio 4 where announcer David Symonds is on air. To help provide coverage for what was now called Radio 4 UK the transmitters at Westerglen and Burghead in Scotland also carried the long wave signal on 200kHz. Westerglen had been in use since 1932 and Burghead since 1936 both carrying medium wave signals for the Regional Programme and later the Home Service and Light Programme.

1 February 1988 – the long wave frequency changes from 200kHzto 198kHz or 1500m to  1515m.

31 March 2024 - separate Radio 4 long wave programmes end.  The last long wave only Shipping Forecast is read by Ron Brown. From the following week the Daily Service and Yesterday in Parliament move to Radio 4 Extra. As of 24 March 2025 Yesterday in Parliament moved back to Radio 4, this time at 5.04am when the broadcasting hours were extended slightly.

May 2026 - announcement made about the closure of long wave transmissions.

27 June 2026 - Radio 4 long wave is due to close at 00.00 GMT (01.00 BST).

BBC on long wave 1924-2026 

With thanks to Chris Greenway. Droitwich site image credit (c) David Martyn Hughes 

Life at the ZOO

The hundreds of shoppers who daily pass by Urban Outfitters and Schuh on London's Oxford Street will be unaware that the building above them played a part in Britain's wartime broadcasting effort.  Yet it was the place where George Orwell broadcast to India and Ed Murrow to the States. It was where John Arlott started his career as a radio producer, at one point working alongside a young David Jacobs. And it was where a girl in the typing pool called Jean Metcalfe got her first opportunity to be in front of the microphone.    

Behind 200 Oxford Street cut through Great Portland Street and then take a right down Market Place and there's a clue for those that spot the plaque on the wall just next to the entrance of what is now known as Orwell Studios. It reads: "From June 1942 for fifteen years, this building was the headquarters of the BBC Overseas Services. During the war direct broadcasts were made to America from the roof while air-raids were in progress, The BBC vacated the premises in November 1957".

In the early days of the Second World War the BBC was asked by the Government to treble its output abroad so increasing the scale of both its Overseas and European Services, then based at Broadcasting House.  Also for security reasons some departments were being re-located, hence the move out to Wood Norton in Worcestershire for the likes of the drama staff.

During 1940 the various parts of the BBC's Empire Service found itself split up over three sites. Most of what would be the European Services was shifted to Bush House - after having first being evacuated to Maida Vale - others were billeted to Aldenham House in Hertfordshire and Abbey Manor near Evesham.

In June1941 BBC engineers indentified the basement of what was then the Peter Robinson department store, just round the corner from Broadcasting House in Oxford Street, as suitable for wartime studios. A surprising decision perhaps as the store had been ravaged by bombing in September 1940 - Broadcasting House itself was hit the following month.

Anyway the menswear department moved out of the basement and the BBC moved in to build the nine (later thirteen) studios and a control room. Some office accommodation was then added to the floors above and from June 1942 staff from both Aldenham House and Abbey Manor moved in.

In fact, as the plaque in Market Place attests, this wasn't the building's first association with broadcasting. During those famous Ed Murrow rooftops descriptions of London throughout the Blitz, the US correspondent had used the top of 200 Oxford Street as one of his vantage points, though he never revealed this at the time.   

Although the upper floors of the building are now named after George Orwell, his time at the BBC as an Eastern Services producer and broadcaster were described by the novelist as "two wasted years." His diary reflects that "much of the stuff that goes out from the BBC is just shot into the stratosphere, not listened to by anybody".

Staff at 200 Oxford Street would jokingly refer to the building as the ZOO. The studios themselves were perhaps not best placed for noise pollution from the nearest tube line. Edward Pawley's history of BBC Engineering explains: "Just as the noise from the Bakerloo Tube could be heard in the basement studios of Broadcasting House when it was opened in 1932, the noise of the underground trains on the Central London Line could be heard in some of the studios at 200 Oxford Street, which were about 50 ft below ground level. It was, in fact, possible to distinguish the arrival and departure of the trains, and the opening and closing of their doors. One of the many overseas visitors who came to visit Bush House after the war claimed that he had been able to identify a particular studio when listening 5000 miles away by the sound of the underground trains — and he was right."

Before her time presenting Forces Favourites (later Family Favourites) Jean Metcalfe had joined the BBC's General Office in the summer of 1940. She soon moved across to the Empire Service to help deal with the fan mail that came in for the announcers. Jean takes up the story of how she got her break into broadcasting: "the Service was expanding with the need to keep overseas territories in touch with London and soon we were moved from our makeshift office in the Restaurant Annexe of Broadcasting House, with its food smells and plasterboard partitions, to 200 Oxford Street, the old Peter Robinson building. Now there were dozens of us working twenty-four hours a day on the Overseas Service. My work became more clerical than secretarial, thank God, and even brought me glimpses of the studios below grounds. One joyous day, May 24th 1941, Noel Iliff asked me to read Thomas Nashe's poem Spring, the sweet Spring in a programme he was producing, Books and People at 1500 GMT. The refrain 'Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to witta-woo' would sound silly, he said, in the deep voice of the presenter, the novelist Gerald Bullet. It sounded pretty silly in mine too, I thought. However, it didn't matter if only a handful of homesick Kenyan planters would hear me, I was on the wireless - at last."

BBC producer Trevor Hill was one of the BBC staff, at that time a Programme Engineer, who made the move round the corner to Oxford Street where he worked on Radio Newsreel and many other programmes: "My job, when I started work at 200 Oxford Street in the Continuity Studios, was to play music on gramophone records besides complete programmes recorded by the BBC on seventeen-inch 'slow speed' discs. That was in the days before microgrooves had been invented. The BBC slow speed records would have things like Front Line Family recorded on them. Then there was the Epilogue. On a particular Sunday evening when I was working in the Continuity Studio for the Pacific Service I had a very nice Australian announcer on duty with me, Isabel Ann Shead. The trusting Ann turned to me and asked what was next on that day's Routine Transmission Schedule. I consulted the document. 'Oh, it's the old E-pill-o-gog,' I replied facetiously. Miss Shead went into action. 'This is the Pacific Service of the BBC.' We were allowed the slightest reverential pause for such a Sunday transmission. 'The E-pill-o-gog!' declared the good lady for all to hear."  

David Jacobs was briefly based at 200 Oxford Street after the war when he joined the BBC as an announcer in a team that included Jack de Manio, Jean Metcalfe and Mary Malcolm. His recollection of his time there seems to be full of japes: "for instance during a band show at Hammersmith Palais de Danse, where I was sharing announcing duties with Mary Malcolm, Mary turned to me before one number and said 'I can't think of anything, David - what shall I say?' 'Oh, say the next tune reminds you of the film Sweater Girl,' I told her. Mary had not time to sort this out. She trustingly stepped up to the microphone and announced to a large section of the English-speaking world: 'The next number always reminds me of the film Sweater Girl. ladies and gentlemen, The Jersey Bounce!' And her horrified 'Oh, David, you're dreadful!' also went winging out on the waves before she stepped back again."

But it wasn't all high jinks for David. For a while he was also one of the readers on Book of Verse, produced by a recent recruit to the BBC staff, one John Arlott. David recalls:"One of the things John taught me was how to get a story told in thirty seconds or a minute with a beginning, a middle and an end. he had me looking out of the window of his room overlooking Oxford Street and said, 'Righto, here's a watch. I want you to tell me what's happening in that street. You have to start when I tell you and when it comes to thirty seconds you've got to be halfway through and knowing you've got thirty seconds to finish and at the minute you've got to have finished. Not a minute and one second, a minute.' He had me doing that for quite a time, which I found very attractive for two reasons. One, that he should take the trouble to do it, and two, that he was concerned that I should learn. Ever since, it's been very useful, because if somebody says ' Will you give me thirty seconds,' I can count in my head and do it."

There's footage of the exterior of the buidling dating from 1953 on the Getty Images website.

The BBC continued to occupy 200 Oxford Street until late 1957 by which time any remaining staff were moved over to Bush House. The building then reverted back to retail use and was occupied by C&A for over forty years until the company closed down its UK business in 2001.   

In 2006 the site was redeveloped by ORMS Architectural Design on behalf of Redevco (the ultimate owners of C&A's property portfolio) to create the retail space for Urban Outfitters and Shuh and then apartments above named Orwell Studios. With that rooftop view from which those wartime broadcasts were made you can now occupy a 2-bedroomed penthouse apartment for £1.7m.  

Seeing by Wireless

"A mighty maze of mystic rays is all about us in the blue." So sang Adele Dixon in the opening programme of the new BBC Television Service, launching exactly 80 years ago today.

The opening night was the culmination of years of experiment, test transmissions, disputes about the preferred system and, ultimately, good old British compromise. This was an early example of a format war - a precursor to the VHS versus Betamax argument four decades later.

The pre-history of television can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century with a number of discoveries and inventions: the electro-chemical effects of light, the photo-sensitive properties of selenium, scanning discs and cathode ray tubes. 

It was left to others to realise how these discoveries could lead to a television system: Boris Rising in Russia and A.A. Campbell-Swinton in England, but the technical limitations of the time meant they never progressed. Campbell-Swinton announced that his idea "could not be got to work without a great deal of experiment, and probably much modification."

On the scene comes Scottish engineer and inventor John Logie Baird  - the archetypal 'mad scientist' who also invents the glass safety razor and thermal undersocks - who starts to grapple with the mechanics of what he called a 'televisor'. In June 1923 he inserts a notice in The Times : "Seeing by Wireless - Inventor of apparatus wishes to hear from someone who will assist (not financially) in making working model." His first model was a Heath Robinson affair built from an old tea chest to form the base for a motor which rotated a circular cardboard disc cut out from an old hat box. A darning needle served as a spindle and biscuit box housed the projection lamp. The lenses he bought from a bicycle shop at a cost of fourpence.

Over the next six years Baird continued to experiment and modify his television equipment and gave numerous public demonstrations However, he was met with naysayers and sceptics including the Post Office and the BBC. A BBC memo of 1928 concluded that "the Baird apparatus not only does not deserve a public trail, but also has reached the limit of its development owing to the basic technical limitations of the method employed."

The BBC relented and gave into political pressure in 1929 and offered Baird's company out of hours transmission time when 2LO wasn't on air with 30-line experimental broadcasts starting on 30 September. Those first tentative steps were seen, Baird estimated, by no more than thirty 'lookers-in' - a set was owned by Baird himself, one each at the BBC and the Post Office, about half a dozen sets in the country and probably about twenty or so on apparatus built by clever amateurs. Technically the first broadcasts were primitive, no more than a waving silhouette and, due to only one transmitter being available, no synchronised sound.

Synchronised sound and vision was eventually achieved on 31 March 1930. The Prime Minister, Ramsey MacDonald, had a set installed at number 10 The performers included Gracie Fields and playwright R.C. Sherriff who announced, with a degree of prescience, that "I am afraid if this invention becomes too perfect, it will cause most people to spend their evenings at home instead of visiting the theatre."

As the technology improved - early highlights included drama and coverage of the 1931 Derby - the BBC began to work more closely with Baird's company, installing television equipment in a studio at the new Broadcasting House. Interestingly the agreement included the clause that "we should be free to give transmissions by other Television methods, whether the Baird transmissions were continued or not." 

Meanwhile coming up on the rails was EMI with their swanky new Emitron cameras based on the new 'iconoscope' technology developed by Russian engineer V.K. Zworykin. EMI had first demonstrated their high-definition television to the BBC in late 1932 where it impressed them with its superior picture quality with three times as many lines per picture and twice as many pictures per second.  

Two competitive demonstrations were arranged in April 1933 with both the representatives of the Post Office and the Corporation agreeing that the EMI equipment was far in advance of Baird's. But the Postmaster-General demurred fearing a political backlash for any blame attached to "the inevitable bankruptcy of the Baird company". The issue wasn't really the provision of the television service but the considerable advantage it would give in the manufacture and sale of receivers.

Baird continued to provide test transmissions for the BBC whilst EMI was spending thousands developing its technology. Eventually, in the spring of 1934, someone concluded that the best way to decide which system to go with, and also to discuss how such a service would be funded, should be by a Public Committee. The House of Commons was told that committee, under the chairmanship of Lord Selsdon, was "to consider the development of television and to advise the Postmaster-General on the relative merits of the several systems and on the conditions under which any public service of television should be provided".

The Selsdon Committee's recommendations (reporting in January 1935) solved little. There was to be no increase in the licence fee nor an additional TV licence. There was to be a new public service from London. A Television Advisory Committee was to be established. No agreement had been reached with the manufacturers regarding their patents so there was to be further testing with Baird and Marconi-EMI (EMI had joined with Marconi in March 1934) under "strictly comparable conditions" with their systems used "alternately".

The BBC announced plans to base its television transmitting station at Alexandra Palace.  In the meantime the Baird 30-line tests ceased in September 1935 at the end of the previously agreed test period and there was a lull before the new service started.  

In November 1935 the BBC's newly appointed Director of Television, Gerald Cock, reported on the plans for the new service as featured in this edition of Popular Wireless magazine:

Ahead of the go-live date test broadcasts were arranged from Ally Pally to the Radiolympia Exhibition in August 1936. Cecil Madden was charged with planning the programmes and announcers Leslie Mitchell, Jasmine Blight and Elizabeth Cowell were on hand to guide viewers through what was on offer, a mixture of live performances and films such as the Queen Mary docking in Southampton and an Arsenal versus Everton football match.

During the interregnum between Radiolympia and the official launch some programmes went out to whoever happened to be watching. 8 October 1936, for instance, saw the first edition of Picture Page hosted by Canadian actress Joan Miller shown sitting at a switchboard supposedly plugging in the 'lookers' as they were still called. Picture Page would be TV's first popular hit running until 1939 and then again between 1946 and 1952.  

The new television service went on air at 3 pm on Monday 2 November 1936 with speeches on both systems (Baird first then Marconi-EMI) from the Postmaster-General, the Chairman of the BBC and Lord Selsdon. The chair of the Baird television Company, Sir Harry Greer and Marconi-EMI's chairman Alfred Clark were each televised by their own system. BBC Chairman R.C. Norman was spot on when he said: "We believe that these proceedings will be remembered in the future as an historic occasion, not less momentous and not less rich in promise than the day, almost fourteen years ago, when the British Broadcasting Company, as it was then, transmitted its first programme from Marconi House".

After an interval and a newsreel the day continued with variety with Adele Dixon and Buck and Bubbles and the newly formed BBC Television Orchestra. Adele Dixon was to feature later, when the evening broadcasts started, in the pre-filmed Television Comes to London complete with that oft-repeated clip of her carefully enunciating the lyrics "by the magic rays to light, that bring television to you." After Picture Page and another showing of a Movietone newsreel the historic day was over.

The launch of the television service 80 years ago is to be recreated tonight on BBC Four in Television's Opening Night: How The Box Was Born. "To find out just what went on, this 21st century team will attempt to piece back together and recreate every aspect of the show from scratch, from the variety acts to the cameras, using the original technology and filming techniques to capture the excitement of the day".

As to who won the battle of the formats, well that decision was made as early as December 1936 when Gerald Cock concluded that the BBC should make exclusive use of the Marconi-EMI system. The so-called 'London television standards' were set as 405-line pictures with 50 frames per second, making Baird's 240-line picture with 25 frames per second redundant. The official announcement was held off until February 1937 as the Post Office was still fearful of the monopoly that Marconi-EMI would enjoy unless adequate guarantees were forthcoming.

Recalling the life and work of John Logie Baird is this 1997 documentary Seeing by Wireless - the Life of John Logie Baird. Narrated by Joan Bakewell it features contributions from his son and daughter Malcolm Baird and Diana Richardson. We also hear first-hand from some of the engineers that worked with Baird: Ray Herbert , Philip Hobson and Paul Revely.

This programme was broadcast on BBC Radio 2 on Sunday 21 October 1997. 

You can read more about Baird and the early days of television on the Baird Television website
The BBC have just launched some additional pages about the Birth of TV on their History of the BBC webpages

Let's Get Digital (Again)

We are told that 80% of new cars have digital radios fitted as standard. In this post I go back to 2000 when the percentage was probably 0.8%.

In the first post in this series I looked at the BBC's Digital Radio Bulletins  between August 1999 and January 2000. I pick things up with the fifth edition from March 2000.

By a neat bit of coincidence the installation of in-car DAB is the lead story. Both Fiat and Alfa Romeo offered Grundig DCR200 decoders in the boot with a 5300 head unit, all for £499. BMW used a Pioneer GEX-P900DAB boot box for £500 coupled with head units priced between £180 to £1325. All very pricey.

Meanwhile the BBC was planning an as yet unnamed digital radio drama and comedy service. Ollie Raphael stated that the service had "already catalogued sufficient material for at least 18 months of non-stop broadcasting - and that's without repeats."  

Bulletin number 6, issued in July 2000 (and the last one I have in my archive) leads with sports coverage and John Inverdale extolling the virtues of a clear signal and the ability to cover more matches on the pilot Radio 5 Live Sports Plus channel.

An article on page 2 raises the question as to whether internet broadcasting would "do the dirty" on DAB. "The main drawback of internet radio lies in the delivery", says Philip Laven, technical director of the EBU. "Individual streams of data take up valuable space on the server. If there's no space left all you get is an error message."   

Radioscape were developing a hybrid digital radio MP3 player/recorder and DAB within GSM mobile phones "within the next 12 months". In another development, predicting some of the principles of the iPlayer, "it will be possible to devote space on a PC which could be 'managed' by the BBC, automatically downloading digital radio material from the multiplex for later listening".

Finally a quick look at digital television. From 1998 comes this promo mainly for BBC Choice linked by Kaye Adams. Noughts and Ones aired on BBC1 on 15 November 1998.

On the eve of the launch of ITV2 this short promotional programme started with a dig at the BBC's approach. ITV2 - A Different View was broadcast on ITV on 6 December 1998. 

Frequency Guide

I was always fascinated by the frequency charts that used to appear in London Calling, codifying and condensing all the shortwave and medium wave listening – VHF in Berlin, of course – to the BBC World Service. You can almost imagine someone having to draft them out on a sheet of graph paper. This one dates from July 1977.

Well even today, surprisingly, they still produce them. With just a little searching I found this page for West & Central Africa. It now looks like they work it all out on a spreadsheet.

Let's Get Digital

With the recent announcement by OFCOM of two applications to run D2, the second national, commercial digital multiplex and last Friday's Drive to Digital: NOW conference, it’s timely to remember of just how far we’ve come in the last 20 years.

It was 1995 when the BBC started digital broadcasts, testing the EUREKA DAB system. But listeners had to wait a further three years before they could buy the digital radios to hear the transmissions, and fork out a few hundred quid into the bargain.  The first model on the market, the Arcam Alpha 10 DRT, would have set you back £800.

In the summer of 1999 the Corporation issued its first Digital Radio Bulletin. I can’t track down a copy of that issue, but here’s the second edition from August.

The BBC’s national and local stations were all guaranteed a slot on the digital dial (well OK there wasn’t a dial as such), with the local licences for Greater London and Glasgow starting in the September, swiftly followed by South Yorkshire, Tyne & Wear and Cardiff/Newport before the end of the year. The first national commercial licence had already gone to Digital One, and was due to launch that October (in the event it was 15 November). The local licences for Birmingham and Manchester were awarded to CE Digital, a group formed by Capital Radio and Emap Radio, with eight services for each one. “We would like to squeeze on more stations but the quality would suffer”, said Tracy Mullins, spokesperson for the Radio Authority.  

In the third bulletin from November 1999 there’s news of a joint BBC/Digital One marketing campaign. Glyn Jones, the BBC’s project director, said: “Both Digital One and the BBC recognise that this is a time for co-operation to help deliver the substantial benefits of digital radio to UK consumers. Working together on a range of marketing initiatives will help each of us attract more attention and have greater impact.” There’s also news on Radio 5 Live Sports Plus and that Mark Byford, chief executive of the World Service, had his digital car radio stolen.

 

 

 

January 2000, and in this issue there are plans from the BBC for an “album and archive station”, plus services “devoted to the UK’s black music scene, a part-hours service for the Asian community, and another archive-based station – this one for the BBC’s extensive hoard of radio plays, comedy programmes and readings”. Page three announces that the “first portable digital radio will be available early in 2000” with news that Roberts Radio are to launch a new receiver. For those with deep pockets you could buy the TAG McLaren Audio Cleopatra at just £4000 plus £900 for the digital option.   

What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?

Can you tell your frequencies from your wavelengths? Here’s help from the Ladybird book How It Works: Television.

 

Published in 1968, I’m guessing, from the stations on the radio dial, the artwork was commissioned the previous year. The text was written by David Carey. The illustration is by B.H. Robinson.

Pip-Ninety-Pip-Not-Pip-Out-Peep

Marking the hour, every hour like, ahem, clockwork. The Greenwich Time Signal aka The Pips. Those little tones are ninety years old today. Happy bleeping birthday!

The proposal for a time signal came from one Frank Hope-Jones in a radio talk in April 1923. Reith and the Astronomer Royal, Frank Dyson, agreed on the idea of broadcasting Greenwich Standard Time with a chronometer at the Royal Observatory tripping a switch at five seconds to the hour to create those iconic pips – using a 1kHz oscillator, for the technically minded. The time signal was first broadcast at 9.30 p.m. on 5 February 1924.
 

Time signal broadcasts in 1928

Note that half-past the hour time signal, these days we normally associate them with marking the top of the hour. In fact the signal is generated at quarter past and quarter to the hour also, although this is rarely (ever?) broadcast. They often provided a neat programme junction, such as the 7.30 p.m. pips you’d hear when Radio 2’s VHF signal was returned to the station after having being ‘borrowed’ by Radio 1 on a Saturday afternoons in the 70s and 80s.    

From the start there were always six pips, but the last one was extended from 1/10th of a second to 1/2 a second on 31 December 1971; the result of an international agreement to adopt “leap seconds” which required a seventh pip now and again.  As the BBC Handbook helpfully used to say: “all that needs to be remembered is that the exact start of the hour is marked by the start of the final long pip.”

Custody of the pips is handed over from the Greenwich Royal Observatory
to the BBC on 5 February 1990. Pictured are Dr John Pilkington (left) of the
RGO and Duncan Thomas, Director of Resources (Radio) for the BBC. 

In February 1990 responsibility for generating the pips was taken over by the BBC, the equipment stored in the bowels of Broadcasting House. They’ve not been without incident: they started to come adrift by a few seconds in 2008 and in 2011 they packed in all together. Computer problems were blamed.

So here’s my ‘pips soundscape’ to commemorate those ninety years of time-keeping. You’ll hear the voices of Mr Hope-Jones, Peter Jones, Sandi Toksvig, Barry Cryer, Terry Wogan, Jan Ravens, Eddie Mair and Keith Skues. The music includes Handel’s Clock Symphony, Delia Derbyshire’s Time To Go, David Lowe’s themes for BBC News and part of Damon Albarn’s Radio Reunited. 
 

You can follow the Greenwich Time Signal on Twitter @BBC_GTS where you’ll find it sulking in the basement and berating the continuity announcers.

Normal Stop

After 70 years the BBC’s External Services moved out of Bush House this summer. Equipment and furniture was auctioned off and the building will eventually be refurbished and let as office accommodation.

But for many that worked beyond that Aldwych portico – although not purpose built for the BBC the building’s dedication “to the Friendship of English Speaking Peoples” was apt – the warren of corridors, offices and studios will be sadly missed.

Well now you can revisit the old studios of Bush House courtesy of a new website Normal Stop. The site is written by Barry Warr and Jeremy Lowe who both worked at “Bush” for many years. It provides a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes at the technology that put the multitude of programme and languages on the air.

And why Normal Stop? As Barry told me it’s because “on BBC mixing desks there is an point on a fader scale at which the signal travelling through the desk is at its optimum – that’s called the normal stop (usually 20 or 23 on the fader scale)”.

http://radiooperations.blogspot.co.uk/

Edit 13 February 2025: the Normal Stop site is no longer functional  

The Killing Off of Ceefax is a Bad Idea

Thanks to Steve Morton for this guest blog post on the BBC’s CEEFAX service, now in its death throes with the final roll-out of digital tv and the “Red Button”. Steve’s career was as an RF engineer with various Government departments. Nowadays he blogs about life here in France and has a keen interest in new technology as well as the old tech Filofax.

It's a sad day when it was announced that the main TV transmitter in the South East of England shut down its analogue service and went digital only. Now I'm not against digital transmission, far from it. But along with the killing off of the analogue TV service saw the last of the Ceefax teletext service that first came on air back in 1974. It reminds you how old you are when you see a technology come in and go out nearly 40 years later!

For all its faults Ceefax has one big advantage over the internet, which is infinite bandwidth in terms of the number of customers it can serve at any one time. Being a broadcast only service it doesn't suffer from overload when lots of users are looking for information at the same time.

We are all so used to turning on our PC's and calling up say a travel news website to see what the current road conditions are etc. However think back to the bad winters recently when the trains have all ground to a halt due to a few inches of snow and you will soon see where Ceefax could still have a purpose. During these periods of bad weather the common complaint from train passengers is 'we couldn't find out any information' or 'the website crashed'.

Well it would with such a huge peak in demand placed on the servers during that sort of weather event, who will design their webserver to have such a huge capacity for those odd less than five percent time periods when the traffic demands soars to unseen levels....

With Ceefax there is no such problem, it just kept pumping out the information pages as required, the receiver filtered the pages to show just the information you wanted. As long as someone in an office or control centre somewhere could up-date the information everyone with a Ceefax receiver would have up to date information.

Going back to the 1980's some of you might remember the BBC B microcomputer, there was a teletext add-on for this machine, in a way it was a form of internet connection although you couldn't send data or emails only receive information.

The technology for a teletext decoder is so tried and tested and as cheap as chips these days that it could be easily be built into a tablet computer as a receive terminal for times when you just need to receive information not transmit it. This’d most probably be a function that could be designed in software.

Now you might say that's ok, but Ceefax is a bit 'blocky' and low res, yes but there were other higher res versions of the specification that were agreed but never fully implemented.

Maybe the new 'Digital Teletext' as used on the Digital TV systems might find its way in to tablets and mobile phones in the future for my 'receive only data service' which for a lot of people just wanting a news up date or travel up date will be more than enough... and cheap too.

Further reading:
http://www.reghardware.com/2012/04/18/ceefax_london/
http://johnosbornepoet.blogspot.com/2012/04/pages-from-ceefax.html
http://www2.tv-ark.org.uk/teletext/teletext_bbc.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext

Traffic News (Beep Beep Yeah)

With Sat Navs and phone apps there’s no shortage of realtime traffic data but many motorists still rely on the radio. In this post we’ll take a leisurely drive (although in reverse gear!) through the history of national radio traffic bulletins. 

Last year on the R2OK Forum the question was posed about traffic news on Radio 2 – when did they start and have they always been on the network? The consensus of other posters, myself included, was that they always been on Radio 2 but that dedicated news reporters had only been on air since “Sally Traffic” joined in 1998.

Like me you’ll probably remember both the Radio 1 and Radio 2 DJs interrupting their shows to read out a traffic flash. Traffic bulletins are no longer heard on Radio 1, and haven’t been since some time in the late ‘90s I’m guessing (Dom’s One Road Travel aside). Here’s Newsbeat’s Carolyn Atkinson on Kevin Greening’s Breakfast Show in 1997:

Over on Radio 2 the voices of Sally Boazman, Lynn Bowles and Bobby Prior are as well known as the DJs.






It was back in 1998 when Johnnie Walker was due to take over Radio 2’s Drivetime slot from John Dunn that changes were made. In his autobiography Johnnie writes:

"One of the things I felt really needed changing was the travel news...we decided it would be a good idea to have a dedicated travel newsreader to collect and announce information twice an hour. Jude Howells, who had produced The AM Alternative with me on Radio Five, remembered how well I'd got along with Sally Boazman on GLR. We'd never actually met as Sally broadcast down the line from a studio in Scotland Yard. A meeting was set up and we hit it off straightaway"

And to prove the point here’s Johnnie, before he took over on Drivetime, sitting in the John Dunn in early 1998 reading the traffic news himself:

At that time there were already fixed travel news bulletins, though not as many as today. In 1998 in the morning you could hear bulletins at 06:40 and 07:10 during Sarah Kennedy’s Dawn Patrol and 07:50, 08:20 and 08:50 during Wake Up to Wogan. In the afternoon they restarted at 15:50, then 16:20 and 16:50 during Ed Stewart’s show and during Drivetime at 17:20, 17:50, 18:20 and 18:50.

Whilst Johnnie was chatting to Sally in the evenings in the morning Wogan had his team of “underlings”. Newsreaders Alan Dedicoat, John Marsh and Fran Godfrey read the traffic bulletins and participated in a bit of light-hearted banter with the Togmeister. Here’s Fran with Terry in November 1999:

Throughout the 70s and 80s both Radio 1 and Radio 2 carried traffic flashes as and when there was a problem to report, and from about 1969 (two or three years later on Radio 2) used specially recorded jingles. Here’s a selection of those jingles, firstly from Radio 1:

And these from Radio 2:

From the late 70s and early 80s here’s Tom Browne, Mike Read and Paul Burnett on Radio 1:

Over on Radio 2 from the 1980s listen to Terry Wogan, David Hamilton and Ray Moore.

Traffic bulletins were certainly around in the late 60s, here’s Ray Moore on Breakfast Special in 1969.

The billing for Breakfast Special reads "with resident bands and singers of the week, discs, news, weather and traffic reports." Reports were read as and when they became available with no fixed bulletin times. For many years, of course, they relied solely on police and local authority reports into the BBC’s Motoring Unit so they consisted mainly of planned roadworks and major motorway incidents.

The reporting of known road closures can be traced back even further. From 1964 this Radio Times billing shows a regular Sunday five-minute Road Round-Up from Jim Pestridge. Jim would go on to produce and then present the long-running weekly magazine programme Motoring and the Motorist. Billed as “a weekly survey of the world of motoring” it ran from 1957, initially on Network Three then the Home Service and Radio 4, and finally pulled into the garage in June 1977. For the first dozen or so years it was presented by motoring journalist Bill Hartley and the programme included “topical news and the latest Road Conditions.”

In 1977 the BBC Handbook made reference to a special service advising of fog affecting motorways. It goes on to say:

“… where conditions are such as to constitute a threat to safety, information is broadcast immediately on both Radio 1 and Radio 2, and as soon as possible on Radio 3 and Radio 4. Each of the other networks then directs listeners to a summary of Motorway Fog Alerts broadcast on Radio 2 only, following the News Summary on the hour.”

 

There was even an ominous sounding Radio 1 Motorway Fog Alert jingle dating from 1976, though nobody can recall it ever being used on air.

Back in the mid-60s the then equivalent of Drivetime was Roundabout and that too had traffic reports. Writing in early 1967 the producer, Brain Willey, said "It's very much a family programme for all age groups and tastes - but we do have the motorist specially in mind. Hence those last-minute flashes on traffic jams and hazards. Again, we remember that drivers hear music more distinctly than speech, so we give a slight boost to voice volume".

Holiday traffic can ruin a bank holiday getaway as anyone knows who’s been stuck on the A303 near Stonehenge or the A64 to Scarborough. Not surprisingly holiday traffic reports seem to have been a regular radio service for many years. In 1958 on the August Bank Holiday the Light Programme included Holiday Traffic with Raymond Baxter (of Tomorrow’s World fame) and John Ellison.  

 

You may have used the TP or TA function on your car radio that automatically detects any local travel bulletins, preceded by three bleeps (above) on commercial radio stations. This uses Radio Data Systems technology that has been around since the early 80s. But in 1971 the BBC’s Research Department was testing a service that they called “Carfax”. This was to be a dedicated traffic information service used to transmit bulletins with no linking material in between. Carfax was to employ a single medium wave channel and have a new network of low-powered transmitters. One of the drawbacks is that it required the installation of a special in-car receiver. Though successfully trialled the project was pulled as a suitable operating frequency couldn’t be negotiated and it would have been too expensive to implement at a time when the Corporation was facing cutbacks.

Its the Radio Data Systems Traffic Message Channel (RDS-TMC) that is used to send up-to-date traffic information to your in-car navigation display or sat Nav. The signal is sent out on Classic FM's frequencies by Traffic Link, which is now part of the American owned INRIX Inc.

For those popping over to the Continent you may recall that Radio 2 broadcast Cross-Channel Travel bulletins just after the 8 am news at the weekend during the summer months in the late 70s. Shortly after the tunnel opened in 1994 a Channel Tunnel Radio service went on-air to provide information to those approaching the tunnel and ports, this closed in September 2000.

More recently another specialised service, Traffic Radio, went online and on digital radio. Run by Global Traffic Network on behalf of the Highways Agency it was on-air between 2007 and 2011, the plug being pulled as part of the Government's cuts.

So there you are, no firm conclusions reached but I hope you enjoyed the journey. Happy Motoring et Bonne Route.

See also Wireless on Wheels - A Brief History of Car Radio
Goodbye Traffic Radio